Jaxon Van Derbekenhttp://www.chron.com/author/jaxon-van-derbeken/
http://www.chron.com/crime/article/Dead-body-probe-on-Lombard-Street-in-S-F-6414831.php
article6414831Fri, 31 Jul 2015 02:22:13 UThttp://www.chron.com/bayarea/article/Structural-damage-closes-historic-Berkeley-pier-6402542.php
article6402542Fri, 24 Jul 2015 13:38:44 UThttp://www.chron.com/crime/article/Modesto-massacre-suspect-charged-in-earlier-death-6402263.php
article6402263Fri, 24 Jul 2015 01:03:07 UThttp://www.chron.com/news/article/Child-welfare-workers-were-suspicious-of-Modesto-6398245.php
article6398245Wed, 22 Jul 2015 01:15:44 UThttp://www.chron.com/crime/article/Modesto-massacre-Mystery-death-of-victim-s-6395304.php
article6395304Tue, 21 Jul 2015 05:31:42 UThttp://www.chron.com/bayarea/article/Vallejo-kidnapping-How-the-evidence-measures-up-6392890.php
article6392890
Authorities have amassed an unlikely collection of evidence — everything from a stolen Ford Mustang to blacked-out swimming goggles and a spray-painted water pistol — that they say points to a former Marine and Harvard-trained lawyer as the mastermind of one of the most unusual crimes in recent memory. Much of the material seized from Matthew Muller, 38, appears to bolster the account of a Vallejo woman and her boyfriend — a tale initially dismissed as fabrication by the city’s Police Department — that she was kidnapped in the middle of the night March 23 and held for two days before being dropped off at her mother’s home in Orange County. In them, the anonymous author claimed to be the leader of an “Ocean’s Eleven” group of gentlemen criminals who had started out by stealing cars and graduated to something much more sinister — a kidnapping “training mission.” The e-mails — in particular the 10,000-word missive sent March 28 — are alternately boastful of the group’s exploits and apologetic for the crime, dismissive of Vallejo police, and minutely detailed about how the abduction of 29-year-old Denise Huskins from her boyfriend’s Mare Island home was planned and carried out, and ultimately went awry. Authorities picking through the e-mails in deciding whether to charge Muller in that case have found evidence to back up some of the narrative supplied by the writer, and other elements have been corroborated by Huskins and her boyfriend, 30-year-old Aaron Quinn. “We are three acquaintances, two of us college graduates, who followed a path we did not think would lead to such horrific crime,” said the author of the March 28 e-mail. When he was interviewed by the FBI hours after the kidnapping, Quinn said an assailant had placed swim goggles with tape over his eyes, keeping him from seeing anything, according to an FBI criminal complaint filed against Muller. Huskins, interviewed by agents after she was released in Huntington Beach on March 25, said she had awakened to “several” suspects holding guns with red lasers, the FBI said. In the March 26 e-mail, the writer says Huskins and Quinn each woke up with a red dot on their faces looking down what appeared to be an assault pistol with rail mounted illumination and laser sight. [...] it was an amateurishly spray painted water pistol with a laser pointer and flashlight duck taped (sic). ... Agents who searched the car, the South Lake Tahoe residence, the home where Muller lived with his mother in Orangevale (Sacramento County) and Muller’s self-storage unit in Vallejo have turned up no real weapons. The March 28 e-mail says the plan was to choose a couple, take them into custody in the middle of the night, and ask them detailed questions about every aspect of their lives. Quinn says he and Huskins were separated, and he was ordered to give up checking and credit card information, along with e-mail account information and the password to his Wi-Fi router. Quinn said the assailant gave him a set of headphones playing a recording that said his girlfriend would be kidnapped so the group could collect “financial debts.” Huskins was ordered to restrain him with zip ties, and he was duct-taped and left on a sofa with scissors he could use to free himself when he awoke, he said. Police who responded to the initial kidnapping report noted that a motion-sensor camera had been attached to the ceiling of Quinn’s home, the FBI said. [...] authorities found a blood-pressure cuff and zip ties in a search of Muller’s storage locker in Vallejo, according to court documents filed by the FBI. Quinn’s blood was tested for drugs March 23, but results from a state lab have not come back yet, the FBI’s criminal complaint said. Money, according to the March 28 e-mail: “The Mare Island kidnapping was a training mission to test means and methods that would be used on higher net worth targets.” The FBI’s criminal complaint against Muller is silent on whether another woman had previously lived in the home. The FBI’s criminal complaint against Muller says Vallejo police determined after the kidnapping that “numerous crimes” described in the March 28 e-mail had in fact been committed. Most noteworthy,” the criminal complaint said, were “swim style goggles that had tape covering the lenses, which ... had a long blonde hair stuck in the duct tape. In the trunk, the document said, was “a Super Soaker-type water pistol that had been spray-painted black and had a flashlight and laser pointer taped to it,” like the one described and shown in a photograph in the March 26 e-mail. There was also a cell phone that had the same picture of the water pistol sent in that e-mail. The car’s navigation system contained the Huntington Beach address where Huskins was released, the criminal complaint said. In searching the South Lake Tahoe vacation home, authorities also found a laptop that was similar to the one that Quinn said was stolen during the kidnapping, federal agents said. The evening of March 25, Vallejo police spokesman Lt. Kenny Park told reporters that the incident was “an orchestrated event and not a kidnapping,” and said police manpower had been wasted. The FBI’s criminal complaint says he was “an active contributing member of Nextdoor.com, a website that contains a blog dedicated to community issues on Mare Island, including crimes that occur there.” Vallejo police found that crimes cited in the March 28 e-mail had been discussed on the website, the FBI said — implying that whoever wrote the e-mail could have learned about those crimes by following the blog. The FBI’s criminal complaint also hints that authorities became suspicious of Huskins’ account of being sexually assaulted during her ordeal, and wondered about a stretch of several hours when she dropped out of sight of law enforcement after her release. When she first spoke to Huntington Beach police shortly after she was freed March 25, she “denied that any sexual assault had occurred,” the FBI document says. Police let Huskins go and arrangements were made for her to meet FBI agents and return home, but “she could not be located and did not make any attempts to contact any members of law enforcement, even after numerous requests through family members by FBI” and Vallejo police, the FBI said. On March 27, Sesma interviewed Huskins again and told her there were “inconsistencies with specific details to her earlier statements regarding the events surrounding her kidnapping and the sexual assault,” the criminal complaint said. Neither e-mail sent to The Chronicle mentions a sexual assault, but the March 28 missive does say, I felt that the team member handling Ms. Huskins was going to give up and go to authorities. ]]>
Sun, 19 Jul 2015 00:16:53 UThttp://www.chron.com/news/article/S-F-ambulance-response-time-still-lags-civil-6389686.php
article6389686Fri, 17 Jul 2015 00:39:42 UThttp://www.chron.com/news/article/2nd-fire-in-same-spot-on-Bay-Bridge-closes-lanes-6386793.php
article6386793Thu, 16 Jul 2015 03:15:19 UThttp://www.chron.com/crime/article/FBI-seizes-drones-from-Vallejo-kidnap-suspect-s-6384702.php
article6384702Wed, 15 Jul 2015 03:13:42 UThttp://www.chron.com/crime/article/Vallejo-kidnap-suspect-s-journey-from-Harvard-6382969.php
article6382969
A Harvard Law School graduate. [...] named as the unlikely mastermind of an absurd kidnapping scheme. A 59-page FBI affidavit outlines a stranger-than-Hollywood plot that involves masked intruders who write e-mails boasting of their crimes before the whole enterprise falls apart when Muller allegedly leaves his cell phone behind in a botched home invasion. [...] Muller also says in court documents that he is a Marine veteran suffering from Gulf War illness, bipolar disorder and psychosis. According to various online biographies, Muller graduated Bella Vista High in Fair Oaks outside Sacramento in 1995. After the military, he went to community college and then transferred to Pomona College, graduating summa cum laude with a double major of public policy analysis and economics. [...] according to an online legal profile, he earned the title “Polka King of the Claremont Colleges.” Muller even stepped in to manage the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program when its director went on sabbatical, the program’s website says. By May 2011, Muller was a respected member of the State Bar of California and soon went to do immigration work for the San Francisco office of the Pasadena firm Reeves and Associates. [...] the firm, by October 2011, had sought a temporary restraining order to keep him from destroying data they say he stole in his final days there. While the March attack in Vallejo was written off as a hoax, Muller allegedly left his cell phone behind in a second late-night crime in Dublin. Investigators now are trying to piece together similar unsolved 2009 crimes involving a masked suspect invading women’s homes in Palo Alto and Mountain View, said Palo Alto police Lt. Zach Perron. ]]>
Tue, 14 Jul 2015 05:21:24 UT